There are too many! For starters, DJSims' Badge Scholarships (a fair reward for all that hard work), Squinge's Community Lot Skilling, MATY's abortbedmaking and coffeecuphack (how did I live without them?), MTS's MogHughson's DinnerForEight and SimWolf's Clothing for YA to Elder (suddenly, the older people are better dressed in all my neighbourhoods!) and SimLogical's Elder's Sleep Through Night. All excellent and highly recommended!

I'm mainly a mod addict.
The one mod I really can't play without is one to adjust geme speed to 50%. I've started with Merola's Time Clock and changed to Chris Hatch's Time Controller which is global and more comfortable. This mod is followed by several others to adjust the game to the slower speed as far as possible (slower skilling, slower energy gain while sleeping, more coffeine...).
Place two is the Community Time Project, no more time warps while visiting a community lot. Sims will come home at the time they left the community lots, not when they left the home lot.
Then there are countless mods to make the sim life harder (higher bills, no20Khandout, nofreefood, harder homework...) and a few to make it not too hard, together with others to make the game more reasonable - and some just to have fun with my soms.
Lately I've started to use custom eyes and skins. And don't forget hair, clothes, recolors build/buy mode objects, clutter... did I forget something? Well, everything that forces my game to need 20 minutes to load now.

Hi Lee! This is pbox =). Your site was down recently (which you doubtlessly know =P ), glad to see it's up again.

Anyhoo, at some point I reinstalled TS3 (and rather unsurprisingly, discovered the game still sucks at least as much as I remembered), and since I had wiped my old downloads I had to actually go and redownload/remake everything, so I got a pretty good idea of what I really *really* need before I even bother to start the game:

Critical:

- AwesomeMod
- No Build Sparkles, No Censor, No Intro
- Five tons of XML tweaks by myself (mainly career overrides and no free crap and suchlike)
- Rabbithole rugs
- Lighting fixes for broken/silly EA doors
- Default replacement for sidewalk (since the EA one looks .. pink-ish grey-ish yellowish grey? Like uh .. something you'd find you forgot at the very back of your fridge, not plastered all over the street)
- Default replacement for wrong-way-around wood floor slats by I don't know who (from MTS)
- Just-a-column (that simple square column by .. was it Flabaliki?)
- and if I could have found it, your EuroWindow =). I managed to dig up an old version but that crashed my game (I hadn't played in like ever, so was on a much newer version now), then I searched high and low but the download seems to be gone from mts =(. This is not a hardly disguised request or something, but I guess you'll be happy to hear that your window is one out of two buildmode downloads I consider indispensable =).

Nice to have:

- Liberated stuff along the lines of my liberated signs and other CAW objects (since all of that is already in game, why shouldn't I be able to use it?)
- Inge's LotSizes for convenience (would be indispensable if AM didn't include a similar option)
- No-deco defaults by "haru" (MTS I believe .. what removes the flowery crap from a lot of EA objects)
- Adjustable curtains, although I never got around to actually use them (I was already so used to just ignore curtains since the EA ones never fit)
- Simple kitchen and table by myself

In a word .. mainly things that attempt to fix issues, get rid of crap, and make the game useable in general. I don't think I ever downloaded any clothes for TS3 and I never really felt a need to .. hair, a little, but mainly "liberated" versions (like adult hair made useable for teens), nothing radically new or different. I haven't bothered to redownload any sim-related stuff at all for my "I'll try to play again" experiment, not even defaults. But I did use default skins before and they made a difference, so if I had been more involved now I'd probably have installed them again.

For TS2, I guess the answer would be along the same lines, although of course I can't remember very well anymore what exactly I was using .. definitely the LotAdjuster, the neighbourhood .. thingy .. , and the CommunityTime mod. That one really changed gameplay in a big way. Plus much of what JMP made, and I guess a window or fourty-five by that Leesetter person. I used much more CC in general with TS2, recolours and clothes above all, since without CAW there often was no way to make the EA ones look decent (and the EA meshes were more bizarre overall, as well .. like funky costumes and stuff, but no plain T-shirts).

Just to name a few and if I don't have the name of the author of the mod it's because I honestly don't know who created it. There are probably more to mention (over 530+ files alone in my "Global Mods" folder) but I feel confident in mentioning these.

Also hairstyles, custom lighting, TV and PCs as well as lots of custom vehicles.